“Ah, away with you.” He ran his fingers through his thinning hair. “Jeanie, I’m sure that’s all long forgotten. The invitation to visit Kugel’s lab was approved by Anna. She signed off on it.”
“Did she?” I said. “Well, of course that makes everything fine, doesn’t it?”
I should have known better. Irony is totally wasted on McAndrew.
He beamed at me. “I knew you’d see it my way when you had the facts, Jeanie. How soon can we leave?”
I think my inner voices are pretty good when it comes to warning of trouble. The problem is, I don’t always listen to them.
This time I allowed another event to occupy my mind when I ought to have been worrying about McAndrew’s visit to Earth. In my own defense, I must say that the intrusion came from outside. When the linked spheres of the Assembly were halfway to Earth, with Mac and me cozy in the Control Section, I received a message from Hermann Jaynsie at the United Space Federation Headquarters.
It was long and wordy, because Hermann is long and wordy, but I can boil it down. It said, in essence, “What the devil did you do, Captain Roker, on your last cargo haul from the Jovian system to Earth? We thought we had a deal with them for four billion tons of vegetable foodstuffs, grown in our Europan ocean farms. Now Earth is telling us they don’t want to take delivery of any more shipments.”
The lightspeed round-trip travel time to USF Headquarters was seven minutes, so I couldn’t exactly chitchat back and forth. But I did send him a pretty long reply, which again can be boiled down to, “Damned if I know, Hermann. They seemed happy enough with what I dropped off last time.”
My livelihood wasn’t hurt by the cancellation of a food supply contract with Earth; but my ego was, and I spent a good deal of time fuming. Was it Anna Griss, getting at me in a remarkably indirect way? I knew she was capable of subtle malice. But I still looked for a more logical explanation. I couldn’t see even Anna risking Earth’s food supply just to get at me.
I had no intention of going to Earth, or wasting another minute thinking of Ernesto Kugel and his mysterious invariant. So when we arrived at the Colony drop-off point, where the Assembly would be moored until its next trip out, McAndrew and I went our own ways. He headed down on a shuttle, as excited as a child on his way to a birthday party. I mothballed the ship, and handed it over to the local USF maintenance crew.
That took me three days. And then on the fourth morning, without thinking about what I was doing, I found myself aboard a shuttle vessel.
Heading for Earth.
I had been given a number to reach McAndrew, and I forwarded a message to tell him that I was on the way, and when and where I would arrive. I didn’t ask, but I rather hoped he might be waiting for me.
He wasn’t. And it was one of life’s less pleasant experiences to pass through entry formalities, search for Mac’s face, and see Van Lyle waiting for me on the other side of the barrier.
“Captain Jeanie Roker.” He reached out and took my hand. “It’s been a while.”
I shook his hand, but my feelings must have showed on my face, because he laughed and said, “Don’t say anything. You did what you did, and I thoroughly deserved it. Let bygones be bygones.”
But he touched his fingertips to his bent nose.
I said, “McAndrew—”
“Is having too much fun, Captain, to tear himself away from the Geotron facility. He asked me to come to the port, and take you there to join him.”
It sounded awfully plausible. But I couldn’t put the past behind me as easily as he claimed to have done. “Professor McAndrew asked you to come and meet me?”
Instead of answering, Lyle took a palm-sized phone from his pocket and tapped in a string of numbers. “Four one seven,” he said into the unit. After a few seconds’ pause he handed me the phone.
I found myself staring into the tiny screen at a familiar high-cheekboned face. His wispy hair was sticking up in little random spikes, and his color was a fraction ruddier than usual. I couldn’t see his fingers, but I could bet that he was cracking the joints.
“Jeanie,” he said, as soon as he saw me. “I didn’t expect to hear from you until you arrived at the Geotron. What’s wrong? Are you having problems getting underwater?”
Underwater? But it was McAndrew, without a doubt. McAndrew live, healthy, unrestrained, and by the look of it having the time of his life. He actually did not sound too thrilled by the news of my arrival.
“No problems,” I said. “I touched down just a few minutes ago.”
“Right then. I’ll have to go. We’re very busy here.” And his picture promptly vanished. The phone link disconnected.
That was the genuine McAndrew, without a doubt, and he was clearly all right. The smart thing to have done at that point would have been to apologize to Van Lyle for my rudeness, plead prior job commitments off Earth, and turn right around and head back to space. Instead I handed the little phone back, sighed, and said, “Before I make a complete fool of myself, tell me one thing. What is a Geotron, and where is a Geotron?”
Van Lyle stared at me. I think I had actually managed to surprise him.
“You’re asking me what a Geotron is?”
“I am.”
“But didn’t Professor McAndrew explain to you?”
“He would have done—if I had given him half a chance.”
“Well…I’m not a scientist, as you know very well.”
“Nor am I. That ought to make things easier for both of us.” We started walking toward a sleek high-speed aircar, as Van Lyle said, “Well, you know what neutrinos are, don’t you?”
“Yes. They’re elementary particles, with no charge, and a tiny rest mass. Their discovery was predicted by Pauli in 1931, because they were needed to preserve the laws of conservation of energy and angular momentum.”
That was gross intellectual dishonesty, and I knew it. But Lyle didn’t. He looked quite impressed.
“Right,” he said. “All they have are spin and energy. And they don’t interact much with ordinary matter, unless they have very high energy. That makes them the devil to detect. A free neutrino can easily pass right through the Earth. But sometimes that can be an advantage. Like if you want to do down-deep exploration. And you decide to build a Geotron.”
He explained the rest of it as we took off and he flew us west at Mach Ten. The staff of Earth’s Food and Energy Council had done all the easy exploration of Earth’s interior that they could do—which meant prospecting to about twenty kilometers down. Now they were forced to search deeper, or else be dependent on off-planet resources. The Geotron was nothing more than a huge kind of X-ray machine, for examining the inner structure of the Earth. But instead of X-ray radiation, which would penetrate no more than a few feet, the machine generated tight beams of high-energy neutrinos. They could be sent in any direction. They passed right through the middle of the Earth, scattering off structures in the interior, and emerged at points around the world where their numbers were measured. Then a very fancy set of computer programs took the information on the detected neutrinos and used that to deduce the interior structures that they had encountered in their path from the Geotron to the detection chambers.
“Looking for primordial methane, as the primary target,” Lyle explained. “Pockets of compressed methane left over from the time of the Earth’s formation, and still trapped deep inside.”
“To use as fuel?”
“Lord, no. Methane’s far too valuable an organic material to burn—even if the laws permitted it. We use it for complex hydrocarbon synthesis.”
“Have you been finding any?”
“More than you would believe.”
It occurred to me that I had an explanation to offer Hermann Jaynsie for Earth’s lack of interest in the food supply contracts. There would never be a shortage of nitrogen on Earth, with an atmosphere that was nearly eighty percent that gas. If they now had enough hydrocarbons, and enough energy, elemental food synthesis would be a snap.
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br /> The most surprising thing was Van Lyle’s willingness to tell all this to me, an outsider. Didn’t Earth’s Food and Energy Council care any more who knew what? Or were there missing pieces that were not being mentioned?
“I understand the Geotron,” I said. “But what was that about being underwater?”
“Well, you don’t think we’d put it on land, do you? Solid surface is too precious. We put it on the seabed.” And then, when I looked puzzled. “Captain Roker, just how big do you think the Geotron is?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“Then I’ll tell you. The main ring is forty kilometers across.”
Forty kilometers. A long day’s walk. Or in this case, a long day’s swim.
“So it was built on the Malvinas’ continental shelf,” he went on. “Where there’s a lot of available seabed, and the water is only fifty to a hundred meters deep.”
“Malvinas?”
“Off the east coast of Patagonia. We’ll be there in half an hour. Then you can see it for yourself.”
In the next few minutes I learned that the Malvinas’ coastal zone was now Earth’s hottest development area, site not only of the Geotron but also of the world’s most modern food facilities and genetic laboratories; all, naturally, off-shore, in the shallow seas that ran for hundreds of kilometers east of the mainland.
And while Lyle talked, I struggled to remember where Patagonia was. Southern hemisphere? Definitely. South America? Probably. It occurred to me that although I could quote the size and approximate orbital parameters for every major body from Mercury to the edge of the Oort cloud, I did not know the geography of Earth.
We were flying near the edge of the atmosphere. I stared up at the familiar black sky, with the brightest stars showing, then turned my eyes down to wisps of white cloud, with far below them the alien sea.
I felt, as usual when I was on Earth, a long way from home.
Our descent to the Geotron did nothing to ease my feeling of alienation. I had not realized that our aircar was amphibious, until we were skimming a few feet above long, rolling waves. We touched down, planing across the surface in a cloud of spray. Lyle took his hands off the controls.
And instead of bobbing on the rollers, we kept descending. After a few moments of panic, while the water level rose past the windows and plunged us into a green gloom, I realized that the aircraft was not only an amphibian, it was also a submersible. I could hear the thrum of engines aft, and see the yellow beams of light that lit the way ahead and behind us for many meters.
“Lights for passenger viewing only,” explained Lyle. “Just so you can enjoy the sights. I haven’t been controlling the craft since we touched down on the waves. We’ll be homed in to the Geotron facility automatically—sonic control, of course, not radio. Radio signals won’t travel through water.”
“How far is it?”
“Just a couple of kilometers. There was no point in landing too far away, but the final approach is interesting.”
We had been angling steadily downward. The natural sunlight was vanishing, breaking to cloudy patches of darkening green. Shoals of silver-green fish and what looked like endless thousands of purple squids darted through the beams of our headlights. Then they too were gone, and I had my first sight of Earth’s sea-floor, a smooth grey-brown carpet of fine sediments that swirled up like an ominous mist behind us in the wake of our propulsion jets.
That alien fog made me uneasy. I was much comforted when the huge silver wall of the outer Geotron ring appeared ahead, and we moved to an underwater docking. That felt quite familiar to me. An inward pressure of seawater replaced the space environment’s outward pressure against vacuum, but the same sort of locks were needed. And once we were inside, we could have been in any controlled one-gravity environment between the Vulcan Nexus and the Hyperion Deep Vault.
Van Lyle led the way through the set of connected chambers that formed the control nexus for the Geotron. Other maintenance areas were spaced all around the rim of the main rings, a couple of kilometers apart. After a final up-and-down ride over the top of the inner ring, we were finally spilled by a moving stairway into a big square room, partitioned off into dozens of small work cubicles.
McAndrew sat in one of them with a man and a woman in their early twenties. His shoes and socks were off and he was staring at a listing that filled the whole of the cubicle wall. He looked well, was obviously unrestrained, and gave every impression of a man totally at home and thoroughly enjoying himself.
“There he is,” said Lyle. “I was wondering, why does he take his shoes and socks off when he’s working?”
“In case he needs to count to more than ten.” But I didn’t know the real answer, any more than Lyle did, and I had known Mac for a long time. At least he wasn’t cracking his toe joints at the moment.
We walked forward. Mac saw me first, and stood up. “Jeanie! This is Merle Thursoe and Tom O’Dell. We’re setting up a really great experiment.”
He nodded to me, almost dismissively, and turned back to the display. Then something—maybe my snort of anger—must have told him that this wouldn’t quite do for someone who had come so far to see him.
“Tom, Merle,” he said, “would you carry on without me for a few minutes?” And then, turning back to me and standing up, “Jeanie, I don’t think you know Ernesto Kugel. Come on. You have to meet him.”
He walked me right through the complicated center of the room, to a cubicle no bigger or better furnished than any of the others. Sitting at a desk there, facing outward, was a serious little man wearing a formal black suit, white shirt, and dark blue neckerchief. A matching blue rose adorned his lapel.
“Director Ernesto Kugel.” McAndrew was at his most formal. “May I present Captain Jeanie Roker.”
Kugel stood, came around his desk, and bowed, giving me a splendid view of the top of a hairless scalp as smooth and white and round as an ostrich egg. His whole head was free of hair, except for the neatly trimmed black moustache on his upper lip. I decided that nature could never have created the effect. Ernesto Kugel had worked on it.
I was all set to dislike the man, when he straightened up and took my hand.
“I am delighted to meet you, Captain Roker,” he said, in a deep, smooth voice. “Professor McAndrew told me that you are most competent. What he did not mention is that you are also elegant and beautiful.”
I stared at him. “Does that line work often?”
He gazed back, unblinking and unashamed, his brown eyes as bright and lively as a bird’s. “Not so often.” He suddenly smiled, and it transformed his face. “But let us say, it works often enough.”
“And I suppose that joking about it works, too?”
“Sometimes. Most times. And if it does not”—he shrugged—“what harm has been done? God made two sexes, Captain Jeanie—and luckily that was exactly the right number.”
I suddenly found it impossible to dislike him at all. We stood grinning at each other, until McAndrew said, “I want a word in private. Just the three of us.”
“Of course.” Kugel nodded his head toward the cubicle. “But this is as private as we get. I believe it is bad if I hide myself away from where the real work is done. Bad for my staff—and worst of all for me.” Kugel waved to us to sit down. His desk was as neat and organized as Mac’s was usually messy.
McAndrew didn’t waste any time. “Ernesto, I could explain our discussions to Captain Roker—to Jeanie. But I would feel much more comfortable if you were to do that.”
“Of course.” Kugel leaned toward me, and spoke in his low, confidential voice. “You should sleep with him, you know. You two should have children.”
I turned on McAndrew. “You brought me in here, just to hear a proposition on your behalf? You ought to be old enough to handle your own public relations.”
“That’s not what I meant!” Mac waved at the other man. “Keep going, Ernesto.”
“Of course.” Kugel was chuckling to himself. “What I mean, Capt
ain Jeanie, is that the man standing before you, Arthur Morton McAndrew, is a great genius. His genes, and your genes, should be preserved and cherished. I knew his reputation long before he came here, but now I realize that he is one of the immortals.”
“But I’m not fit to carry Dr. Kugel’s coat, when it comes to large-scale engineering,” McAndrew added. Praise of his abilities makes him terribly uncomfortable.
I sighed. It was obviously a mutual admiration society. Apparently I had travelled the distance from Moon to Earth, just to hear the two of them compliment each other.
“But to be specific,” Kugel said, after a long pause in which they sat nodding and smiling. “Before Professor McAndrew’s arrival, I and my staff had operated the Geotron for three months. In all that time, we had observed an inexplicable loss of neutrinos. We know how many the machine produces. And we know how many we are finding, in each of our mobile detectors. From that it is a simple calculation to estimate the total number escaping over the whole of the Earth’s surface. There were too few of them, less than we were creating—and not by a number within the reasonable bounds of statistical error. There were far too few. For a long time we thought that it must be a matter of phase changes, or instrument calibration. Finally we decided that could not be the case.
“We had no explanation. Until two of my brightest young staff, Thursoe and O’Dell, became involved.”
“Jeanie met them both,” McAndrew said.
“Then you must know, Captain, that both of them are far brighter than I. They proposed a specific physical reason for the absence of neutrinos, arguing by analogy to the conserved vector current theory of Feynman and Gell-Mann. That would imply the existence of a new kind of weak force, and a new physical invariant. It was speculative, but I thought it looked very interesting. I mentioned the work and the theory in my weekly report of activities to the Food and Energy Council. I did not expect that it would receive external circulation—until the sudden arrival of Professor McAndrew’s request to visit the Geotron facility, and review the evidence.”
The Compleat McAndrew Page 21